Do Bilingual People Have a Cognitive Advantage?

For years, psychologists have been debating the “bilingual advantage” – the idea that speaking more than one language fluently brings with it cognitive benefits. Believers and skeptics in the theory have been trading blows for a while, but matters recently came to a head in the form of a series of papers in the journal Cortex.

The bilingual advantage hypothesis states that bilinguals excel at ‘cognitive control’ also known as ‘executive function’ – meaning that they find it easier to